Astros hope to follow Phillies’ rebuilding model

PHILADELPHIA — When the Astros become either the first victim or the first conqueror of what is if not the greatest rotation in baseball history than certainly its most eagerly anticipated, they will be staring 60 feet and six inches away from they want to become.

Not literally of course. Michael Bourn isn’t going to become 6-4 with a devastating cutter like Roy Halladay.

But what the Astros want to be as an organization.

The Phillies’ glut of pitching is enviable by 29 other teams. Where the Astros come in specifically is their stated goal to be able to build a roster like the Phillies have, first building a farm system to the point that talented players become expendable. And then for the right payoff, expend them.

Philadelphia’s rotation is five men, like the rest of baseball. The real story involves 14.

The first is Cole Hamels, drafted in the first round in 2002 as the star lefty with the perfect pitcher’s frame and off-field concerns that would bubble up and just as quickly fade. The next was neither Halladay nor Cliff Lee. Neither Roy Oswalt or the forgotten fifth, Joe Blanton.

It was Carlos Carrasco, a Venezuelan righthander whom they signed in 2003 and traded five years later as a quarter of the package that landed them Cliff Lee.

Swapping talent for talent

And so on and so on 12 more times. Raise a player, develop him, make him expendable with other moves either internal or external and ship him out as a bartered good.

“Any time you acquire talent of this level, you have to give up a lot of talent,” Phillies general manager Ruben Amaro Jr. said. “The fact that (scouting director Marti Wolever) and his people and (international scouting director) Sal Agostinelli bring in the talent necessary to get guys like Oswalt and Lee and Halladay and Blanton. When you start naming a lot of the players, even going back to Cory Lidle and Kyle Lohse and guys we’ve acquired during the season, you have to have a lot of talent in your system to do that.”

Trading for an ace is still in some regards about budgets, as the investment in terms of prospects is generally not worth it if the player — often about to hit free agency if he is being dangled – won’t sign a lucrative extension. And in that light, the prospect payoff the Phillies have had to give up isn’t always equivalent.

“More often than not, you look back on what guys got traded for and it won’t blow you away,” said Jim Callis, the executive editor of Baseball America. “But the Halladay trade is the one that could work out for both teams.”

The Blue Jays, when they traded Halladay, got their own No. 1 starter-to-be in The Woodlands High School graduate Kyle Drabek, almost unquestionably the best prospect the Phillies gave up in any of their deals. The rest of the 11 players were all either picks in the top 10 rounds or international signings, but there are no surefire stars in the group.

The ability to turn prospects into big league talent if they aren’t going to become the homegrown stars themselves is the Astros’ goal as well. It was Ed Wade’s charge when he was hired in 2007 to succeed Tim Purpura coming off one of the worst drafts of the decade.

Making progress

Houston found its way to that point on a microscopic scale — compared to the Phillies moves over three years — when they had no place left in the organization for second baseman Albert Cartwright to get at-bats and traded him to Philadelphia for reliever Sergio Escalona. Again, a minor coup. Escalona did not make the Astros in spring training.

But Wade thinks the Astros are making steps toward that end.

“I’m excited about the level of competition,” Wade said of the minor league side of spring training. “We’ve got some kids over there this year who are disappointed that they’re not moving to a level above where we think they should be. To a large extent, that’s because we have depth.”

It has never been a stated intention, but the Astros are emulating the Phillies of the last decade in their attempt to get more athletic, as Philadelphia was always among the biggest buyers of high-upside players.

After going college-heavy throughout the beginning of the 2000s, the Wade-Bobby Heck administration picked Jason Castro, a college catcher, with their first pick in 2008 but went wild on athleticism and young athleticism after that. Jordan Lyles, Jay Austin, Telvin Nash, Jiovanni Mier, Delino DeShields Jr. and Michael Foltynewicz are all athletic high schoolers chosen in the first three rounds in three years worth of drafts.

Right now, those players are all seen as vital pieces in the Astros’ rebuilding. The hope is that some day they — or the next set of up-and-comers — will be expendable in a good way.